Though opposition candidate Vojislav Kostunica clearly won the first round outright, Putin’s government chose to continue supporting Milosevic; it warned the world against interference in Yugoslavia’s domestic affairs and pronounced itself in favor of a second electoral round. Putin offered to mediate in the crisis, a proposition in which neither Milosevic nor Kostunica showed interest, despite Russia’s position as Yugoslavia’s sole post-Cold War ally in Europe. (The alliance is relatively recent: Former Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito broke with the Soviet Union in 1948 and set his country on a course of nonalignment. But relations improved somewhat with the death of Stalin. After the Cold War, Russian communists effected a rapprochement with Milosevic, the last remaining communist ruler in Europe.)

The more Western leaders expressed their support for Kostunica, the more Russian communists and nationalists pressured Putin not to give up on Milosevic. Gennady Seleznyov, the speaker of the Duma (Russia’s Parliament), blamed NATO for orchestrating Milosevic’s defeat in the first round, and Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov remarked that the whole electoral crisis smelled of “marijuana, vodka and dollars” — conspiratorial views widely shared by the Russian public and buttressed by reports that the United States had spent $35 million to help Kostunica win.

Ultranationalist Duma member Vladimir Zhirinovsky summarized the Russian case for standing by Milosevic thus: “Kostunica’s victory would lead to Yugoslavia completely breaking away from Russia and entering NATO. It is not the Milosevic regime we should rescue, but a country that has been our ally.”

Pressure from the Duma notwithstanding, Putin appeared unconcerned, and in the midst of the crisis chose to visit India, where he had more pressing matters to attend to — namely, a $3 billion arms deal.

It was not until after Yugoslav demonstrators had stormed the Parliament building in Belgrade and taken over state media that Putin finally sent his foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, to “mediate.” Coming so late, this move looked pro forma, prompted by a desire to perform at least the basic functions of a superpower trying to resolve problems in its sphere of influence.

By the time Ivanov arrived, however, all he could do was congratulate Kostunica on his victory and receive a pledge from Milosevic not to use force to hold onto power. Putin apparently judged the meeting with Milosevic necessary so that he would not appear to be caving in to the West — which would earn him disfavor in the Duma and with the public.

Should Milosevic’s fall and Kostunica’s rise be viewed as a victory for the West and a defeat for Russia and its president? Neither. Kostunica has denounced NATO and pledged not to surrender Milosevic to the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands (which has indicted him for war crimes). Kostunica is a nationalist who has voiced support for the Serbian side in Milosevic’s ethnic wars and hopes to hold onto Kosovo; he is unlikely to prove a pushover for the West. Besides, Milosevic lost the elections not because Serbian voters suddenly developed a distaste for ethnic strife or a love of the Western alliance that bombed them, but because Milosevic brought about the ruin and dismemberment of their country. Putin and his advisors know all this, and have reason to think they may soon have a chance to wield influence in Kostunica’s government.

Belated as it was, the Russian president’s decision to go with Kostunica reflects not a pro-Western change of heart but a desire to cut losses: Putin abandoned Milosevic only after he proved a liability. The damage a continued alliance with Milosevic could have done to the Russian economy appeared considerable and long term. Even though Russia has supplied Yugoslavia with gas and oil since the Kosovo war, and has invested millions in the reconstruction of the bomb-blasted country, Moscow’s principal economic interests have lain in cooperation with the West — and particularly with Europe. (Russia has just begun the process of working out a lucrative deal that would double its fuel exports to the European Union.) Among its major trading partners are the larger countries of the EU, which imposed sanctions on Yugoslavia as a result of the Kosovo conflict.

That Russian communists and ultranationalists could not weigh their country’s economic interests against the fate of a discredited dictator, or even see that his time was up, speaks to their ineptitude and presages their coming irrelevance on the Russian political scene. Like Milosevic, they have ended up losers in the post-Cold War world.

In recognizing Kostunica, Putin showed himself a pragmatist, one who would not, in the end, be forced into playing a losing hand. He knows that in Russia, more than anywhere, history shows little mercy to losers.

Gusinsky was detained for three days in Moscow’s czarist-era Butyrka Prison, charged with defrauding the government of $10 million, then released, pending trial. Two days after Putin’s July 11 speech, state prosecutors and officers of the FSB returned to MEDIA-Most and took away more documents, warning that Gusinsky may be arrested again. No one has seen the evidence that the prosecutors say they have gathered against him.

Western reporters and political commentators on NTV have equated Gusinsky’s arrest with a Soviet-style attack on freedom of the press. They say NTV is being persecuted for its frank coverage of the war in Chechnya and its failure to endorse Putin in presidential elections. Putin’s KGB past, and his pledge to strengthen the state and its control over the media, seem to bear out the direst suspicions.

But the events are a bit more complex than that. Gusinsky’s arrest is part of a campaign to fortify the state, a campaign with one overriding aim: an assault on the oligarchs — Gusinsky being one of them — who oppose chief oligarch and Kremlin insider Boris Berezovsky.

Berezovsky happens to own 49 percent of the main state television channel, ORT, which is NTV’s main competitor. Berezovsky, who was the most influential member of Yeltsin’s court, is thought to have engineered the rise of Yeltsin protigi Putin to the presidency through a combination of intrigue and financial and media support. His choice of Putin may well have been based on the latter’s KGB background. As a spy chief, Putin presumably had the dirt on all the other presidential candidates (witness the speed with which they withdrew from the race, and the fawning alacrity with which they pledged him their allegiance), and on Berezovsky’s rivals as well.

Hardly a day now passes without the announcement of raids and indictments against Berezovsky’s rivals (alleging, for the most part, tax evasion and embezzlement). Recently, for instance, government auditors announced an investigation into Anatoly Chubais, head of the electricity monopoly Unified Energy System. Chubais, who designed many economic reforms under Yeltsin, said the charges that he allowed foreigners to invest illegally in the company were “absolutely laughable.”

The oligarch hit list also includes former untouchables Vagit Alekperov, head of LUKOil, Russia’s leading oil company; Vladimir Potanin, former deputy prime minister and the owner of Norilsk Nickel, one of Russia’s most profitable enterprises; and Vladimir Kadannikov, the boss of AvtoVAZ, the producer of the country’s most popular car, the Lada. AvtoVAZ may, in fact, be partly owned by Berezovsky, which illustrates the complexity of the matters at hand. (The raid against AvtoVAZ could have been a feint designed to convince the public that Putin is acting independently of the widely hated Berezovsky. Berezovsky’s announcement on Monday that he is quitting the state Duma in protest of Putin’s moves against the oligarchs may be another such ruse.)

All in all, the pressure on Berezovsky’s rivals suggests that Putin’s state and Berezovsky are redistributing between them the spoils of privatization auctions held in the mid-1990s. As the loot is redivided, the last voices of opposition need to be silenced. (I say “last” because many of the current restrictions on the press stem from the Yeltsin-era Ministry of the Press, from acquisition of media outlets by oligarchs, who use them to advance their own agendas, and, where the provinces are concerned, from the tight control imposed by tyrannical and unreconstructed local administrations. Putin is simply continuing a process begun under his predecessor.)

But such dissent is not being silenced — at least so far — on a scale recalling Soviet times. Today, as during the Yeltsin years, Russians on the street excoriate, ridicule and inveigh against their government. And despite Gusinsky’s arrest, NTV still broadcasts damning reports about Chechnya, official corruption and Putin’s plans to smother the press. Shutting up NTV will not be easy, if only because Gusinsky is wealthy and determined to stay out of prison. He will use his media to save his skin.

Few Russians, besides journalists, seem to care about Putin’s move against Gusinsky. Their apathy has a simple, two-part explanation. First of all, the media, for decades a tool of propaganda, elicits no special sympathy from a public whom it routinely duped and led astray in Soviet times, or dupes and leads astray now in the service of the oligarchs and state. Second, and most important, Russians possess a sophisticated, firsthand knowledge of what their country has become since 1991.

On hearing about Gusinsky’s arrest, my Russian friends said, “Well, he must be guilty of something — all our businessmen are!” They are alluding to the Byzantine nature of laws and the malleability of justice here — the core problems that have turned the “reforms” much touted in the West into a nefarious and often bloody farce.

Russian businessmen are often assumed guilty by the public, and they may be right: There are too many contradictory laws on the books for them to operate a business without violations. Tax evasion becomes something of a necessity since the approximately 20 separate levies on the books would, if complied with, tax as much as 105 percent on gross earnings, depending on the region.

To stay afloat, businesses keep a secret chornaya kassa (a “black” accounting ledger accurately showing profits and losses), and present to auditors from the Tax Inspectorate only the belaya bukhgalteria (or “white” books — a false record of low profits and high expenses). Auditors, who work for a commission (a percentage of the taxes they collect), may also expect, during their frequent and prolonged “official” visits to businesses, to be feted with vodka and caviar, munificent gifts and perhaps young lovelies. Such favors are, for many company directors, the norm in Russia. Why, the auditor reasons, should he miss out?

Registration and re-registration with numerous local agencies and departments costs hundreds of employee hours on redundant and frivolous paperwork. Bureaucrats offer to expedite this paperwork for “fees” (bribes); without bribes, papers are “lost,” phone calls not returned and the tax man, fire inspector or sanitary officer may show cause and order the business closed, its assets seized, the business head and/or its accountant arrested, and so on. Legal redress at times works, but most often fails, foundering on venal judges and clerks and thuggish police. To stay in business principle falls by the wayside and vodka, bribes and young lovelies are distributed when the tax man, fire inspector and toilet examiner cometh. And since the state pays them little and late, they cometh a lot.

Then there’s the “mafia “– or, to be more accurate, a loose nationwide network of competing territorial criminal gangs, many of whom work in concert with police and government officials. It has been estimated that 80 percent of Russian businesses pay ‘dan’, or protection money, to their krysha (literally “roof”). The krysha demands as much as 15 to 20 percent of gross earnings to keep the business safe from local racketeers (who are the same guys as the krysha, of course). At times, the mafia steals chornaya kassa accounting records and threatens to hand them over to the Tax Inspectorate; businessmen buy them back. But on the whole its a straightforward relationship. Businessmen pay promptly when they come round, not wanting to be beaten, have their offices torched or car bombed, their daughter kidnapped or murdered.

Businesslike as they may be, however, the krysha is not above making playful extracurricular demands, and may request “gifts” from you in the form of a new Mercedes to ride around in, extra sacks of cash for those long nights out at the casino, or, again, young lovelies to keep them company — the cherished and hard-working secretary in the reception room, for example.

When the demands for bribes or protection money mount, or when the business needs to expand to keep up with competitors (who, to keep their share of the market, at times resort to murdering their rivals rather than advertising their wares), businessmen may seek a loan. Russian banks charge interest rates that have exceeded 50 percent a year in the past decade and they often disappear with their depositors’ money.

If businesses manage to make money — it could happen, with luck or if the krysha intimidates or rubs out competitors — the money is sent abroad, by hook or by crook, whenever possible. After all, the bank is unreliable and local investments are unsafe. Capital flight is logical and necessary in such conditions, and has probably far exceeded the amount of loans granted to Russia by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

So at the end of the day, average businessmen probably lack the desire or energy to sympathize with a beleaguered millionaire media tycoon. Nor do they have much faith in Putin or other representatives of the state, which in Stalin’s time may have executed their grandfather, dispossessed their grandmother or starved to death the Ukrainian side of their wife’s family. The only thing they give a damn for is themselves and their loved ones. They are, in short, apathetic.

This morass of crime, tax evasion, venality and arbitrary enforcement of laws stems in part from the negligence of President Yeltsin’s otherwise benign rule. But in the main it derives from czarist and Soviet traditions of an all-powerful state and the concomitant absence of a civil society — of institutions that could protect the individual. The mess serves to keep every businessman in fear. From the entrepreneur with the shop on the street corner to the oligarch with an oil company or a media empire, their guilt can be manufactured on demand when it suits the government, the reigning oligarch or the mob.

So, is Gusinsky guilty? He may be. We do not know, we will probably never find out and it hardly matters, for guilt and innocence in Russia derive from the needs of those in power, be they oligarchs or masters of the Kremlin.

What does matter is that Putin has embarked on a program to strengthen the state, a state that is corrupt and has traditionally plundered its subjects, a state that may end up serving the interest of not of a single party (as in Soviet days), but a single man — oligarch Berezovsky — and his clique. At present, it is unclear whether he will succeed. Much power still lies in the hands of the other oligarchs, besieged as they are, as well as regional governors (whom Putin has targeted for dismissal, but his plan to kick them out of the Upper House of parliament appears to have reached an impasse for now).

The resulting balance of power, as messy as it has been, has prevented any centralized reign of terror reminiscent of the Stalin era. If the oligarchs and governors fall to Putin’s masked men, the Kremlin may set its sights on its citizens. And most, to be sure, in one way or another, are guilty as charged.

She stomped from bungalow to bungalow, shouting about towels. I was one of two Russian speakers in our group. I dressed and went outside, sensing that soon I would be called into service as a translator.

It was a warm, cloudy morning in Moscow in June 1985, and I was 24. Twenty days earlier my American tour group, riding Volkswagen minibuses, had crossed the Soviet frontier near the town of Vyborg, just east of Finland. Starting with the five-hour entry ceremony, little had gone smoothly. Soviet border guards had examined every orifice of the minibuses, peering into tailpipes and checking under the hoods, dismantling seats and pulling apart floors and doors and finally running the vehicles over mechanics pits to check underneath. They snatched every cassette in our possession and played snippets of them on their rusty old recorders; they perused every book and notepad in our luggage; they counted and recorded every dollar, franc and mark in our wallets. During their search they uncovered a stash of literature in Russian on God and alcoholism (forbidden); its carrier, a pleasant young woman with missionary inclinations and doe eyes, was taken away and strip-searched. After she returned, a volley of rude exchanges passed between the border guards and us (we were, after all, tourists — was this how they treated tourists?), but they allowed us to enter. We headed south, stopping in Novgorodka, Leningrad and, finally, Moscow.

Our hotel was out on the edge of the city, in a suburb of six-lane avenues, gray bunker institutes and patches of poplar forest. It could have been a peaceful place.

Following the shouts about towels and Americans, I walked down to the office marked “dezhurnaya” (floor manager) at the end of the row of bungalows. The fat woman grabbed my elbow. Her eyes were small and mean, and I smelled sweat. “Tell your friends to cough up a towel just like this one, and fast!”

“This sounds serious,” I said.

“It is serious,” she answered, her voice somehow turning vulnerable. “Nadezhda Ivanovna will explain everything.”

We walked into the floor manager’s office. Seated behind her desk, Nadezhda looked to be in her mid-30s. Her face bore the narrow lineaments that aristocratic blood imparts to Russians, and her amber hair was rolled into a bun, loops of it dangling over her petite ears. Between her delicate fingers she held a cigarette, and a pack of Marlboros sat upright on her desk. Behind her on the wall hung a poster of St. Basil’s Cathedral captioned with the bold words “THE SOVIET UNION — LAND OF TOURISM.”

Nadezhda got up from behind her desk and pressed flat the wrinkled folds of her strawberry-and-cream sundress. She looked at me and took a slow drag on her cigarette. The maid raved and waved the towel. Nadezhda puffed her Marlboro, smiled and asked if I knew who might have taken the towel. She was concerned, she said, for the maid: Everything in the hotel was registered as state property, and if anything, even a ratty old towel, went missing, the maid would have to pay for it out of her 90-ruble-a-month salary (the equivalent of $15 on the black market).

I had no idea who could have taken the towel, but Nadezhda’s poise commanded attention. Moreover, she exuded a knowing sensuality that, as Guy de Maupassant would have said, “troubled” me. She straightened her dress again, pressing it down around her firm curves. “So,” she said again, “have any idea who might have taken it?”

It suddenly seemed to me that locating towel thieves was a serious matter.

“I don’t know. But I can ask around.”

She took another drag on her cigarette. At this point I became aware of a third presence in the office. At the back of the room, leaning on one elbow on a sofa, was a young woman my age or a bit older. I examined her from the feet up. Her sandal-shod arched feet ended in scarlet toenails; her calves were silky bronze. Over a blue skirt and blouse she wore a maid’s white smock, beneath which two heavy orbs distended her bra. Her neck was slender, her cheeks broad and Slavic — rubicund with a bit too much sun — and her eyes a wan blue. She yawned, brushing aside a shock of brown hair, and, taking a drag on her cigarette, regarded me with what appeared to be languorous amusement, as if she understood the ridiculousness of the scene but knew it would all work out in the end.

The angry maid resumed her bellowing. “Nadezhda Ivanovna, I’ve got to get my towel back, now!”

Nadezhda raised her eyebrows. “I think this young man will do all he can to find it. Why don’t we give him till the next shift?”

The maid relented. Stealing a look at the young woman on the couch, troubled, I returned to my room.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

The next morning I lay in bed as if drugged by the heat. A shuffling in the room indicated that, once again, Soviet maids had invaded without knocking. I opened my eyes, focusing on scarlet toenails and bronzed calves.

“Sleep! Sleep!” said the languorous maid from the previous day. “I just want to do my cleaning on time.”

I lay on the bed, feigning a return to sleep, but with my eyes slit open. As she swept, her breasts swung, her hair batted the side of her face, her toes curled in her sandals. I rose in my bed and faked a yawn. “Actually, I think I’ll get up. I …”

She smiled. “My name is Svetlana. Come to the dezhurnaya’s office. I have my break in a few minutes.” She walked out and shut the door behind her.

I flung myself from the bed and into the shower. Within 20 minutes I was at the dezhurnaya’s door. Nadezhda invited me in. Svetlana was reclining on the couch again.

Nadezhda asked, “May I help you?”

Svetlana smiled and looked away. I didn’t know what to say.

“I … I just wanted to see if you found the towel.”

She moved her eyebrows. “You’re very concerned with state property, aren’t you? Americans are so law-abiding.”

“Oh, well, I … I didn’t want the maid to have to pay.”

Svetlana giggled from the couch.

Nadezhda stole a look at Svetlana, then suppressed a smile and said, “Look, young man, how would you like to come over to my apartment — for an informal meeting.” More giggles from Svetlana. “In a more informal setting, that is.”

Svetlana ran her fingers through her hair. I mumbled a grateful and affirmative response.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

The next afternoon, in a high-rise somewhere out among the last stops on the metro line, I stood knocking on Nadezhda’s door. With me I had brought L’eggs stockings, Bic pens, postcards of the U.S. — what I had heard Russians liked to receive as gifts from Westerners.

Nadezhda opened the door. She looked to see if anyone had followed me, pulled me inside and shut the door softly.

She wore a white dress that showed her curves. Her hair hung free, falling around her shoulders; her nose, I noticed, was aquiline, more prominent than that of most Slavs, and pointed. Her demeanor exuded poise and elegance. I felt myself suddenly in the presence of a woman of sophistication.

On her walls were paintings and gilded icons and shelves displaying silver tea services, boxes inlaid with gems, gold cigarette cases and crystal champagne glasses.

“I … I brought you stockings … and pens.” I proffered my gifts.

She took them and set them aside.

Svetlana appeared in the kitchen doorway. She was wearing a tight blue and white sailor’s blouse and a knee-length blue skirt. “Privyet! You’ve come for lunch, too?” she asked, addressing me with the informal “ty” that bespoke a breaking of the ice. In this situation, it promised some sort of intimacy.

Then Nadezhda, also using “ty,” asked me to have a seat for lunch at a table beneath the icons. After serving us borscht and cutlets, she told me flat out that she dealt in contraband art, and that her husband was in prison for the same.

I nodded as if I had understood all along, but I couldn’t resist asking, “Aren’t you afraid to be telling me all this?”

“I can trust you, I know it. I just wanted you to know what’s on my walls. Those aren’t counterfeits.”

Svetlana smoked and said nothing. Nadezhda then produced a tall bottle of vodka, and to switch the subject I mentioned Mikhail Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign — it was tough to find anything to drink, except in hard-currency shops. She smiled again: She was clearly above such matters, and I felt silly for saying anything.

We resumed our meal. She handled her silverware with decorum — I couldn’t escape the thought that she was descended from noble stock, and that I was in the presence of a countess, if a felonious one.

After the meal, while Nadezhda was clearing the table, Svetlana and I began chatting, and I asked her out on a date. She smiled in a noncommittal way, then said, “Meet me at the Molodyozhnoye metro station tomorrow evening at 7.”

Thoroughly troubled, I returned to the hotel to await our date.

The next evening I rode the metro out to Molodyozhnoye. It was an open-air station. Poplar seed puffs blew around and eddied in the slanting light of evening. The air was hot and smelled of apple trees and lilacs. Svetlana was waiting by the exit, in the same blue skirt and sailor’s top she had been wearing before. She smiled and said hello.

There were suddenly hands over my eyes from someone standing behind me.

“Guess who!”

It was Nadezhda. Beaming, she bounced around and strutted before me. I forced a smile, feeling a twinge of anxiety, lamenting the loss of intimacy with Svetlana to which I had been looking forward.

They each grabbed an elbow and led me down the stairs to the street. “My driver will take us to the restaurant,” Nadezhda said.

A bored-looking Armenian with a low brow and big ears was sitting in a beat-up old Lada, reading Pravda. We got in. We trundled down long thoroughfares, rumbling this way and that across wide intersections, and I quickly lost all sense of where we were headed. Finally, we arrived at a Georgian restaurant somewhere on the southern edge of Moscow, a concrete box with high windows, identifiable as something other than a bunker only by its Georgian-alphabet sign. It was dark and crowded and hot; the place had been heated all day by the sun. There were beautiful, swan-necked women at every table; with them sat swarthy thugs with mustaches and gold rings. Onstage a band was warming up. The mantre d’ led us to a reserved table.

I turned my attention to Svetlana, who maintained her languor even here in the heat. This languor seemed to be impenetrable, beatific in a way — but what lay behind it? Unbridled passion? Gasping sensuality? I wondered.

Nadezhda opened her menu. “Well, what shall we drink, vodka or cognac?”

“Is there beer?” I asked.

“Beer? They don’t have beer in places like this. So, will it be vodka or cognac?” She turned to the waiter and addressed him by name. “Slava, that will be vodka and cognac.”

He brought the bottles and zakuski, or hors d’oeuvres — slices of sausage, tongue and salami, much of it quite spicy and thirst-provoking. Nadezhda poured three shot glasses full of cognac. We toasted to our new friendship and knocked back our shots, then bit into the zakuski. I drank to the dregs and so did Nadezhda, but Svetlana lagged behind just a little. After the third shot my head began to spin, but I felt deliciously relaxed and suddenly empowered, happy to be in Moscow in a Georgian restaurant with two beautiful women; I was ready to risk anything. That Nadezhda, too, had turned up at the station bothered me no more.

The band played Alla Pugachova songs, smarmy and danceable Russian pop with heavy beats and clarion vocals; ballads followed, tear-jerking and ponderous, and the more cognac I drank, the more I loved every song, the more I savored my good luck. Our meal came — a medley of fiery dishes with long Georgian names — and we dug in. Savoring the spices of the Caucasus mountain republic a thousand miles to the south, feeling the cognac course through my veins, I saw entire worlds opening up before me: There was so much in this country to explore!

The cognac finished, Nadezhda uncapped the vodka. When songs came on that the two of them liked, they signaled their delight by squirming in their seats until I asked them to dance. I switched between the two, now taking Nadezhda, now Svetlana. Many of the other women shimmying on the floor with us were equally beautiful, with the sort of bobbed, flouncy haircuts I associated with American women in the mod, pre-hippie era of the mid-’60s. They had made up for a lack of Western couture by sewing their own dresses, creating classy and elegant outfits using patterns cut out of magazines — or at least this was what Nadezhda told me. She also said that many of them, including Svetlana, had only one nice outfit, which they washed and ironed every time they went out.

For years I had been studying Russian history in graduate school in the States, watching Soviet television on satellite TV, socializing with Russian imigris. I had thought that I understood a lot about these people, but I suddenly realized that I knew nothing important: I did not know how they lived, danced, caroused or loved. Even now, listening to Nadezhda, I could hardly fathom the poverty that the small salaries and tiny wardrobes indicated. My own life had been too protected for me to sense the limits in the lives of others.

We downed more shots — or at least Nadezhda and I did; Svetlana began abstaining. When the lights dimmed and a slow song came on, I pulled Svetlana onto the floor and put my arms around her. Up close I smelled not perfume, not sweat, but soap; I also smelled the sweet-sour reek of vodka on her breath. Her front abutted and bobbled against my chest. She was not shy: With the same beatific languor, plus a dash of tipsiness, somewhere during the second slow song she raised her head to mine and we kissed. We started bumping into other couples who were similarly engaged on the dance floor. I reached up to stroke the wet, lank hair out of her eyes, and my hand brushed her cleavage; it was sweaty — and less firm than I had expected.

My heart pounded at the thought of what was going to happen at the end of the evening, and back at the table I resisted Nadezhda’s offer of more vodka. Then it occurred to me — what was going to happen with Nadezhda? She had horned in on my date, and I now felt leery of what was to come; I suspected her charm, and Svetlana’s as well, were being used against me in some clever way.

The band stopped playing and the lights flickered on. The waiter presented us — or rather me — with the bill. It was for 100 rubles (now equivalent to about $3.50), but I, having planned on dining only with Svetlana, had only two-thirds of that amount with me. My traveler’s checks were back in the hotel; there was no way to get to them now, and I told them this.

Svetlana sat back and passively observed Nadezhda’s reaction. In the harsh light, Nadezhda looked older and more severe and a bit matronly; her earlier knowing demeanor now hinted at disdain. “You really don’t have enough money?”

“Well, no.”

“A real man doesn’t come out on a date without enough money. A real man doesn’t even talk about money in front of girls. And he enjoys paying for his date.”

“I’m just telling you the situation. After all, I thought I was going to pay for two, not three.”

The resentment I felt about Nadezhda’s presence returned like a wave of foul air from a reeking lavatory. Who was she to lecture me about money and dates? She took a drag on her cigarette, her face betraying no sympathy: This was my problem, not hers. But then she leaned over and touched my forearm. “Do you want us to have to stay and wash dishes?”

She batted her eyes. The waiter stared at me. Svetlana yawned.

“I’m really sorry. This is all I have.” I placed the contents of my wallet on the table, keeping a few kopecks for the metro.

Stamping out her cigarette, Nadezhda got up and disappeared into a room marked “Staff Only.” There she made arrangements with the manager; they would bring the rest of the money another day.

We drove to a metro station. Nadezhda bid us a polite goodbye, and Svetlana and I got out. On the train back into town the other passengers were few and quiet; there was too much silence to for us to talk. While dancing I had entertained all sorts of thoughts about how to finagle my way into an invitation to her apartment, but I was now overcome with the workaday reality of the scene around me: Some of the people on the train were coming off late shifts, and Svetlana would have to be on the job at 8:30 in the morning.

Reaching her station, we walked out into the damp night and set off down a dark lane overhung with poplars. I felt terrible, confused about how the evening had ended, and I told Svetlana this. She heard me out, shrugged, then began telling me about her life. She was divorced; she had a daughter away at camp by the Black Sea; she had a few girlfriends, but no one to whom she was really close. Her voice expressed a sadness, a resignation that I could not touch, so I just listened. Her life, she said, was “odna obydennost,” just a bland succession of days with nothing to look forward to, but no tragedy to fear, either. The state would take care of her, as it had taken care of her parents and grandparents.

We stopped by an old stone building — her building. She looked down at her feet, then back up at me. She had not intended to beguile me; her voluptuousness was genuine and she was comfortable with it. The commercialized culture of celebrity and beauty and manic dieting that I had known in the United States (and that would have surely put her among the ranks of unattainable belles had she lived there) did not exist here. I felt at first as though this made her naive in a way — her world looked simpler than mine — but then I realized our lives and cultures were so different that comparisons were pointless. She had allowed Nadezhda to come along, but then I would leave and Nadezhda was her boss, and Nadezhda, it appeared, always got what she wanted. Even if I had been used, what did I understand of what it took to get ahead in this country?

There were two worlds then, a socialist one and a capitalist one, and the wall between them kept us apart. The separation created mystery, but in some things in the Soviet Union, especially in relations between men and women, the mystery hid a hardscrabble and banal reality far more complex and difficult to deal with than anything in the States. Western feminism and the sexual revolution had barely affected the Soviet Union, but the differences between the sexes in our two worlds went far deeper than that: Here, feelings and desire and sexual charm were put in the service of goals determined by self-interest, by power and poverty, by a history of upheaval and famine and tyranny that made simple friendship and love rare and all the more cherishable. I did not deserve her trust; I deserved how she had treated me.

My head began to ache from the booze. She promised to come early the next morning and spend time with me before her shift. We kissed. She turned and walked to her doorway, and I walked back toward the metro station to catch the last train. The muggy June night was still fragrant with apple trees and lilacs; in two or three short hours it would pale into phosphorescent green, then tint rose and orange and finally open into limpid blue, only very gradually giving way to the sun. By 4:30 in the morning, when I would already be asleep in my hotel room, the sun would be flooding the high-rises and gray bunker institutes, gilding the windows, and the firmament would radiate a richer azure than I had ever seen before.

She did not come early the next morning to see me.

A few days later, our group reassembled by the Volkswagens and took the road south out of Moscow.

Monday’s election results would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. During the late 1980s and the early ’90s, pro-Western politicians and dissidents (Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, Anatoly Sobchak and Andrei Sakharov, to name some) dominated Russian politics and national life. The reactionary communist coup attempt in August of 1991 was foiled in part by thousands of democracy-minded protesters who confronted tanks in the streets of Moscow. Russia’s liberal media vilified the KGB and communists, and dissidents who had resisted KGB repression were heroes.

In many ways, former President Boris Yeltsin was a benign figure. But his true legacy will be his constitution, which effectively makes the Russian president a czar. It is difficult to imagine that Putin, with Yeltsin’s empowering constitution in hand, will be benign. Indeed, there is reason to fear just the opposite.

While much of the Western press has been preoccupied with the question, “Who is Putin?” the new president’s KGB background speaks volumes about his likely proclivities. The war he launched in Chechnya and his treatment of Radio Liberty journalist Andrei Babitsky confirm his resolve and attitude to criticism. And his own words, which are often the argot of cops and thugs (he has famously promised to “rub out” Chechen “bandits” in their “outhouses,” for example) leave Russians with little doubt about what they can expect from him.

Putin has never released a campaign program, but at times he has made statements about what he would do if elected. He has said that he plans to raise defense spending by 57 percent to “respond to new geopolitical realities, both external and internal threats.” He has pledged to restore a “comprehensive system of state regulation of the economy.” He has described Russians as “not ready to abandon traditional dependence on the state and become self-reliant individuals,” and said that they want “a restoration of the guiding and regulatory role of the state.” Most chillingly, he has praised the KGB as the guardian of Russia’s national interests and advocated the establishment of a “dictatorship of the law.”

“Dictatorship” has a special ring for Russians. Millions of Russians perished during almost three decades of Stalin’s dictatorship. That dictatorship operated according to a constitution and code of laws that rendered illegal everything from tardiness in the workplace to less than enthusiastic remarks about the Leader to the “suspicion of espionage” — a crime punishable by death. In Russia, “diktatura” means blood and beatings, prison camps and shackles. Laws can be composed (and imposed) according to the whims of the ruler.

It seems implausible that Putin would attempt to resurrect in full the dictatorial practices of the Stalin years — a generation of Russians has grown up with the freedoms of perestroika and the Yeltsin era, and task of stifling them would appear unmanageable. But his treatment of the press and repetition of the word “dictatorship” do not bode well, and may indicate that he plans to try.

Despite all this, Russians elected former KGB agent Putin president. Why?

Let us first dismiss the wishful thinking and delusional cant about Russia promulgated by certain Western reporters and various officials of the Clinton administration — that Russia has been “on the path of reform,” “in transition,” “building a free market,” “establishing democracy” and so on. On the one hand, much has changed in Russia since Gorbachev introduced perestroika: Elections have been free if not fair; political debate has been, at least until recently, lively and unrestricted; private commerce has been legalized, if controlled by the mafia and monopolies; citizens have been allowed to travel. But the general trends have been negative and disappointing.

Russians have watched their country slip from the promising turmoil of the perestroika years to the communists-vs.-Yeltsin street-fight passions of the early ’90s to the contract killings, rigged auctions and pervasive atmosphere of criminality of roughly the past five years. In view of all this mayhem, the optimism professed by Western politicians about Yeltsin’s reforms sounded more than misguided. It came across to Russians as rhetoric meant to support thieving Russian oligarchs and corrupt Russian officials operating with two aims — to enrich themselves and to weaken Russia for the benefit of the West, the United States in particular.

To understand Putin’s rise, we first have to look back to the actions of his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, and to Russian history.

On the morning of Dec. 31, 1999, Yeltsin appeared on Russian television to address the nation. “I am leaving,” he said, his voice close to breaking. “Why hold onto power for another six months when the country has a strong person, fit to be president, with whom practically all Russians link their hopes for the future today?” He wiped away a tear. “Why should I stand in his way?”

Indeed, Yeltsin had no compelling reason to stay on, and every reason to quit when he did. He was, after all, a power-driven former Communist Party boss. Though he was called a democrat by the Western leaders he embraced, Yeltsin unabashedly embodied many of the traits of the typical Russian autocrat. His authoritarian demeanor and adroitness at defeating his rivals won him, at least in the beginning, as much popularity among average Russians as enmity among his opponents. Power and survival mattered to Yeltsin. Granting people the freedoms for which they hungered assured him in the early 1990s of a populist appeal no other leader could match.

But by the end of last year, things had changed. His impulsive behavior, tolerance of corruption and inability to stop the fall in living standards had destroyed his popularity. Presidential elections were originally scheduled for June 2000. Had an anti-Yeltsin candidate won, as was likely given Yeltsin’s single-digit approval ratings, Yeltsin and those associated with him might have faced prosecution for everything from genocide to theft of state assets to abuse of power and the destruction of the Soviet Union. The time to resign was New Year’s, when the popularity of Yeltsin’s chosen successor, Vladimir Putin, was high enough to ensure the latter’s victory in early presidential elections.

Yeltsin’s decision to resign surprised everyone, including me, but it should not have. Over the past three years, Yeltsin had appointed and fired four prime ministers, apparently in a search for one who would grant him immunity from prosecution when his second term ended. Last summer he appointed the fifth, Putin, an obscure former KGB agent and the head of the FSB (the successor agency to the KGB). Soon after, Chechen rebels invaded Daghestan, a republic in the south of Russia, and apartment buildings in Moscow and Volgodonsk began blowing up.

The war in the Caucasus and the so-called threat of domestic terrorism gave Putin his chance to establish himself politically; in fact, it is conceivable that toward that end, he and his KGB associates engineered both the war and the explosions. In any case, Russian forces drove the rebels out and pursued them into Chechnya, with much support from the Russian public, who saw in the war a chance to revive their country after years of drift, humiliation and decay.

When, at the end of 1999, Putin’s war-based popularity hit 75 percent, Yeltsin resigned, knowing that the constitution would mandate elections in three months — too little time for Putin’s popularity to wane significantly. It made no difference to him that Putin had never held a political office before. Putin was a trusted member of his entourage. Yeltsin’s trust was well placed: Putin’s first decree as acting president granted Yeltsin immunity from prosecution. The transfer of power differed only in procedure from the abdication of a sovereign in favor of his loyal crown prince.

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The West has misunderstood Russia. This is not surprising, for Russia is remote from the West, and in more than just geographical terms. After the demise of the socialist system and the police state, Russia still has not westernized in the way much of Eastern Europe has.

Centuries of illiteracy, autocracy and isolation made Russia different from the West long before the Revolution of 1917. The single most decisive event in Russian history took place in the 10th century, when Kievan Rus (the ancestral Russian state) accepted Christianity from the Byzantine Greeks, from Constantinople and not from Rome.

A century later the Christian Church split in two, with Rome and Constantinople excommunicating each other, and a state of hostility was born between Russia and Europe. Four centuries later, Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire fell to the Turks, and Russia was left the sole standard-bearer of the True Faith, the last remaining defender of Orthodox Christianity as the Greeks had bequeathed it to them. Russia thus became the bearer of a unique civilization.

If Russia had remained a middle-sized medieval state, this split might not have mattered much to the world. But Russia expanded in every direction to cover one-seventh of the Earth’s surface by Soviet times, which meant more than 8.5 million square miles. (By comparison, the United States, including Alaska and Hawaii, covers about 3.5 million square miles.) Along with its size, Russia’s vision of itself as the possessor of the True Faith would give it a sense of messianic mission that throughout history would grant it a national identity that only the United States could match.

Yet Russia’s isolation from the West had its costs. It missed both the Renaissance and the Reformation. The church and state were effectively one until 1917, and in Soviet times the church served the state and the KGB as it now serves the Russian government. Until the abolition of serfdom in the 1860s, most Russians were slaves and there was no civil society. A civil society may hardly be said to exist even now.

Traditionally, despotic rulers from Ivan the Terrible to Peter the Great and Stalin enacted laws for their own benefit and forced Russians to develop their country at horrific cost in human lives. Yet under totalitarian rule this century Russians built the only country that could rival the United States militarily and scientifically — no small achievement. Always, the regnant principle has been that a strong ruler is necessary to force progress on recalcitrant and lazy masses. Thus, Russia’s former superpower status derived from autocracy, based on notions of absolutism deriving from Orthodox Christianity. That absolutism found its most virulent expression in Marxist-Leninism.

Seven decades of Bolshevism proved the most destructive and disruptive of all. The Bolsheviks atomized a thousand-year-old society, blasted apart rural communities, re-enslaved peasants on collective farms and exterminated or drove abroad Russia’s Westward-looking aristocracy. Stalin killed more people than Hitler.

Yet there have been no Nuremberg trials since the fall of the Soviet Union. The murderers are free or have died in peace. Their descendants run most of the country today. There has been no repentance for the crimes of the past, for the millions exiled into Siberia or executed. In a land where neighbors were taught to inform on neighbors, where one class was sicced upon another, notions of common good hold little currency.

The understandable result of all this is a widespread and ingrained cynicism among Russians: Many believe that only a ruthless KGB master can lash the masses back into line, eradicate oligarchs and clean up the government. In Putin they believe they have found such a man.

A consensus has evolved in the past couple of years between Russia’s political elite and its citizens, a consensus that the past is past and what counts now is Russia’s status in the world as a great power.

Russia’s messianic mission has largely survived the collapse of the Soviet Union. A separate and unique civilization, Russia answers to itself — not to the international community or the United Nations, not to the European Union and not to the United States or NATO. This is inevitable, for Russia’s civilization and separate identity are buttressed by a vast and isolating territory, abundant natural resources and superb scientific capabilities — plus, of course, nuclear weapons.

Russia, thus, is not a country that has strayed from the Western path, a country that can be “won” or “lost” by foreign aid, “engagement” or ostracism. These are words of Western debate that have had little to do with events in Russia.

Despite the theft and corruption of the past decade, Russia can suffer capital flight of $1.5 billion a month and still remain basically solvent thanks to its oil and natural gas reserves. It has not needed the financial aid the West has given it since 1991 — and this is dawning on Western leaders now, as they watch Russia reassert itself in violent and unpredictable ways.

Putin’s election and the confirmation of Communist Party leader Zyuganov as Russia’s second most popular politician should cause a fair degree of unease among Western politicians, for both Putin and Zyuganov have exploited to their benefit the anti-Western sentiment that has been increasing among their supporters. There are many reasons for this shift against the West, including the perception that the West supported Yeltsin to weaken Russia. NATO’s intervention in the Kosovo conflict combined with its expansion into Eastern Europe convinced a majority of Russians that, as Putin has said, Russia still has enemies.

So, what does the future hold for cooperation between the West and Russia? Russia will not be a docile partner. Nor will its national interests coincide with those of the West, especially if the United States aims to expand its military alliance onto former Soviet soil and intervene in the internal conflicts of other participants in Eastern Orthodox civilization. (The Serbs are Eastern Orthodox, too.)

If Russia’s economy improves over the next couple of years — and it should, given the stability Putin will foster — the newfound revenues may go into arms, as Putin has pledged. NATO will be forced to rethink its strategy of expansion, and to abandon the ill-founded doctrine of humanitarian intervention that led it to intervene in Kosovo. That doctrine was born of what will probably pass as an ephemeral moment in history, when Russia was mainly democratic, in disorder, and relatively well disposed to the West.

The West, in sum, must prepare to work for a cautious and realistic entente with Russia, for a new balance of power between two civilizations that briefly drew close, but, as Putin’s election shows, are now parting ways.

We started talking. Oksana, as I will call her here, was 19 and studying fashion design at a Moscow institute. I was 24, a graduate student of Russian history in the States, and traveling around the Soviet Union for two months with a tour group of Americans.

We wandered the deck, chatting and smiling at each other. Chilled by the breeze and appearing somewhat distracted, she drew her jacket snug and asked what I thought of the Soviet Union. As I started to answer, her gaze froze. A matron in a white smock, one of the ship’s employees, got up from her deck chair station ahead of us and, giving Oksana an icy look, went inside. I stopped talking and Oksana, uttering a soft “poka” (“see you later”) strolled on. I understood I was not to follow her. I saw no more of her that day.

At 7 the next morning, the loudspeaker on the ceiling of the cabin crackled and a bugle blast resounded, and then came a screechingly loud message in Russian: “Greetings to passengers of shift A! Arise and report to the deck for morning calisthenics! Our motto is sound mind in a sound body! Greetings to passengers of shift B! Arise and report to wing 2 of dining hall 1 for breakfast! Greetings to passengers of …”

Every day began with a rousing address and instructions for all aboard. Our tour was designated group C so that we would perform calisthenics and eat at separate times from the Soviet passengers. Perestroika was still two years away; fraternizing between Soviets and foreigners was not forbidden, but some Soviets, aware of potential consequences from KGB agents keeping subtle track, tended to avoid us anyway.

The loudspeaker cackled on, and Rob, my cabinmate, grumbled and rolled over in his bunk, his head still heavy from the previous night’s vodka bash. “Oh, those sons of bitches! Can’t they let us sleep even one morning!” He lay looking at the loudspeaker for a minute, then got up, muttering, “I’ll fix those bastards!” He climbed atop a stool and, using a pocketknife, took to disassembling the loudspeaker, at first carefully, then with less than precise hacking motions. Finally the screeching stopped; the speaker dangled an eviscerated mess of wires, broken white plastic and microphone. He climbed down and went back to sleep. I dressed and went out to the deck, hoping to run into Oksana.

One of the breakfast shifts was ending and people were drifting out of the dining hall. Inside, at the back, I espied Oksana, alone and gazing through a porthole. I lingered long enough that she saw me, then strolled around behind a lifeboat. A minute later, from under the boat, I saw tiny white pumps padding my way.

“Did you enjoy your calisthenics?” I asked.

“Oh, come on!” she giggled. “I never go to those!”

There was a warm languor in her eyes, but a tint of despondency lingered there, too. As we huddled behind the lifeboat, she traced for me the outlines of her life: She was dutifully studying for her fashion degree; she came, like many Soviets, to the Black Sea for her August vacation and was here with her mother; she yearned to see Paris and London and other cities in the West, but never did she believe she would be able to leave the Soviet Union. (“Da shto ty!” “Oh, come on!” she would exclaim dismissively when I suggested that maybe someday she would be able to travel.) She recounted her dreams with a shrug. She expected little from her days: They would equal the sum of their hours and no more. Still, I sensed that she could experience happiness more intensely than I, and this drew me to her; the attraction mixed with pity that I felt for her, this delicate lonely girl with wan green eyes who seemed afraid to hope for anything, made me want to give her everything.

A blond grande dame passed by the lifeboat and said in a secretive voice, “I think Soviet-American relations are warming up.” It was Oksana’s mother. I stepped out to introduce myself, but she continued on her way, leaving only perfume in her wake. At that moment I caught sight of a twitchy cad dressed in a gray polyester suit and clip-on tie taking up a position a few yards farther on along the railing. He lit a cigarette and leered at us, then looked toward the sea, then back at us. Oksana, explaining nothing, walked off and rejoined her mother.

I left the lifeboat and walked over to him. He smelled of sweat and Kosmos cigarettes, and looked away when I approached; his fingernails were stained yellow brown, as were his teeth. He might have been a junior KGB agent; if he was not that, he was a freelancer hoping to scrounge together enough compromising information about Oksana to report to the KGB. But I would never know. I left the deck to look for my group.

Over and over during the next week Oksana and I met discreetly, but with increasing ardor, at appointed times by this or that lifeboat, near the windy bow or by the stern, often parting suddenly at her behest. She was good and honest and beautiful; I felt more and more desire for her, for a moment of intimacy with her, and my passion rose in direct proportion to the efforts of our ever-near and malodorous comrade to interfere. Wherever Oksana and I lingered long, we were visited by the smell of sweat and Kosmos cigarettes, accosted by the sound of a clip-on tie flapping in the salty sea breeze.

On our last night before reaching Odessa, we met by the lounge, then slipped separately up and down various stairways to ditch our snitch. We found each other by a secluded bench on the dark uppermost deck and threw ourselves into each other’s arms. It was late August, and already the sea was churning with autumn winds, awash in spindrift now and again frosted by the beams of an evasive moon. We huddled on the bench, exploring each other, enjoying each other with the abandon of youth — and despair. Relationships between Soviets and Americans were tough to keep alive then; letters went missing, phones were tapped, visas were denied. For her there could be long-lasting consequences: Some amatory indiscretion on my part might, for example, get her expelled from her institute. But for now none of that mattered. There were no politics and no tomorrow on the windswept upper deck.

Just before dawn, having exchanged addresses and pledged to write, we kissed and said goodbye.

The next morning there was an urgent rapping on the cabin door. Rob stumbled out of bed and opened it. The matron in white pointed at the disabled loudspeaker hanging from the ceiling. Her Russian was strident: “You should be ashamed! You have destroyed state property! Is this any way to behave? And you have missed the wake-up call! We’re now in Odessa! Pack up and join your group at once!”

I threw on my clothes, grabbed my bag and, leaving Rob, raced out onto the deck. I saw Oksana, and we stole charged looks at each other as we walked down separate gangplanks, I with my monitored group, she with her mother and the other Soviets bound for the train station and the trip back north.

In September, after I left the Soviet Union and arrived in Greece, I began sending her lovesick postcards every day. They never reached her.

If my postcards from Greece never reached her, my later letters from the States did. She was effusive in her responses (“My dearest, most tender Dzheffchik — may I call you that?”), and I wrote back with my passion dampened somewhat by the awareness that a third pair of eyes was no doubt reading every word and registering our tendernesses in a cardboard folder marked Case No. such and such. She described her days at the institute, her plans for visiting Pyatigorsk during next year’s August vacation. In the fifth or sixth letter she posed a question: What, in general, were my views on marriage? I wasn’t sure, I answered; I was still in graduate school and would have to finish before I could take that step, and that would be a couple of years at least.

After that I heard no more from her.

I wrote asking what was wrong and received no answer. I wrote again, and again heard nothing. My Soviet imigri friends in the States said that either the KGB had decided to cut off our relations at the mention of marriage (as was common in such situations) or perhaps she had stopped writing herself, having decided that if I had no intention of marrying I would be of no use to her. Whatever the reason, without knowing for sure I was hurt and perplexed.

Seven years passed. During those years the Soviet Union disintegrated. In the summer of 1992 I moved to Uzbekistan to set up a Peace Corps program, and that autumn my job took me back to Russia. As soon as I arrived in Moscow I called Oksana from my hotel. I was nearly trembling at the thought of seeing her and stepping back into my past, at somehow reliving one of the most exciting and intriguing weeks of my life. But most of all I wanted to find out what had put an end to our correspondence and whether we still had a chance.

“Well, I’m married,” she said flatly after a flurry of greetings and queries, “and I have a baby daughter. Anyway, let my husband and me come pick you up for dinner. Wait for us at the hotel entrance.”

It was a stormy night. At the appointed hour I came down to the vestibule and looked out through the glass doors into the gloom, noting how the pale yellow orbs of the street lamps caught the streaks of descending rain. In the back seat of a car parked off the driveway sat a petite but dark-haired woman. Not blond Oksana, I thought, and turned away.

A car door slammed.

“Jeff, privyet!”

It was Oksana. She now had chestnut hair, and her once doll-like features had matured into the lineaments of womanly beauty. She wore a leaf-print skirt and red leather boots. Grigori, her husband, followed her out of the car. He was in a Western suit; he was cool but polite. We shook hands.

Back at their apartment, Grigori had a business call to make and stepped out of the living room.

“Oh, Jeff! Your letters were so tender,” she intoned, her head cocked to one side. “I have no idea why they stopped coming.” Grigori stepped back in, but it was as if he wasn’t there. She went on. “They were so tender. I felt so romantic receiving them, I felt I had a future. I remember every moment on the ship and how sad it was to leave you.”

“I, well, yes …” I felt the same, but what about Grigori? He listened impassively, offering me hors d’oeuvres and wine. The phone rang again and he left the room.

I hardly knew what to say. So much had changed in the world since our week on the Black Sea. I had changed, and she had married. I found unexpectedly that I could not instantly revive the feelings I had nurtured for her, and I had many questions to ask.

“Oksana, are you happy?”

She sat back and her gaze grew opaque. “Grandma is sick and Mama isn’t doing well. Grigori works hard but it’s tough to make ends meet.” She kneaded her tiny hands. She was as beautiful as ever, but her poetic youthful melancholy had turned into solid adult resignation.

“I read your letters over and over,” she continued. “I could never throw them away. I married Grigori because he was crazy about me — what else was I to do with my life?”

“Well, what about your daughter? Tell me about her.”

“What is there to tell? Mama takes care of her. We’re too busy.” She kneaded her hands and cocked her head again. “Oh, Jeff, why didn’t you come back to the Soviet Union? Why did you stay away?”

I mumbled an inadequate response. There were too many things to explain briefly and concisely: I could have talked about the difficulties of obtaining Soviet visas, the rigorous schedule of my studies, the cost of traveling to Moscow from the States, but I did not. These were not the only, or even the main, reasons that I did not return. I should have told her that I had enjoyed our time on the boat but that my impulse to sweep her off her feet was only an impulse. I was not, back then, of the age to marry; I was too naive and frivolous to realize that in practical terms our relationship would mean more to her than to me. Thinking these thoughts, I felt guilty, and I felt a rush of tender pity and attraction toward her.

Grigori came back, this time to stay. He turned out to be articulate and friendly, and it was clear he loved Oksana; he seemed a much more devoted husband than I would have been. My conversation with him ranged over perestroika and market reforms and his earnest desire to make money to give Oksana everything she wanted. He was working hard, late and on weekends, trying to move up in the Moscow office of a multinational corporation. Oksana paid little attention to our talk; she ate and looked down.

After dinner we drove back to the hotel, Grigori and I taking the front seats, Oksana the back. We whirred along the rain-slick Garden Ring Road in silence, passing over the Moscow River via Kutuzovsky Bridge, the illuminated marble fortress of the Supreme Soviet on one side, the rectangular Hotel Radisson-Slavyanskaja, where I was staying, on the other.

Grigori and I said a pleasant goodbye, and Oksana asked me to call the next time I was in town. I said I would. On my way inside the vestibule, I turned and caught her gaze: She was staring from the back-seat window, a look of penetrating, unmitigated loss on her face. I stared back, transfixed; I could do nothing except reproach myself. Why hadn’t I persisted with our relationship, flown love struck to Moscow? What had stopped me? Why had I not understood the promise our relationship held, and why had I been so reckless with her fate and my own?

They drove off into the rainy night.

The next summer I moved to Moscow permanently. I did not call Oksana, feeling that to have done so would have aroused intractable emotions in both of us, and I wanted to be no home wrecker. But often I found myself wondering how she was doing.

Three years passed. In 1996 spring came early and brought a delirium of long blue days and brief musky nights, nights that dissolved in the warmth of lavender dawns. Unexpectedly, Oksana called to wish me a happy birthday. I felt a wave of excitement on hearing her voice, and without thinking I asked her to dinner. We agreed to meet at Mayakovsky Square.

At the appointed hour I stood waiting at Mayakovsky Square beneath the bronze statue of the eponymous poet, luxuriating in the vesperal light, feeling as though somehow this evening was going to prove decisive.

A Volga taxi drove up and Oksana stepped out. She wore a suit of Parisian couture; she had cropped her hair, which she had dyed red, into a pageboy cut.

“Hello,” she said, her eyes restive.

“Hello. How are you?”

“Oh, where are we going to eat?”

“What about the American Bar and Grill?” It was a trendy place I thought she might enjoy.

She looked askance. “What, you mean eat burgers? No thanks. Anyway, that’s a hangout for young people.” She said she preferred the upscale Italian restaurant a block away on Tverskaya Street, so we went there to eat.

The candle at our table flickered, the waiters were attentive, Oksana relaxed. But after a while she glanced this way and that and fidgeted with her napkin. Her hands, I noticed, were red and chapped — from doing dishes, apparently.

And not only dishes. “My husband and I had to knock down a wall in our apartment recently for renovations. Can you believe it? I was swinging a sledgehammer!” She was not amused: This was not something a husband should allow his wife to do. She was also exhausted from taking care of her invalid grandmother; her mother, too, was recovering from a stroke and needed attention. Grigori’s salary, though high by Russian standards, didn’t suffice for the lifestyle she desired; she upbraided him, saying he should be trying harder to earn more for her. “Unfortunately, my husband is not capable of supporting me in the fashion I would like. He lacks initiative. It’s a shame, really.”

“Well, he’s trying.” I protested. “Doesn’t that count?”

She looked away. “Oh, come on!” After a pause she said in a reconciliatory tone, “Why don’t we talk about you? What have you been doing? Traveling?”

“Yes, I’ve been in Morocco and Zaire lately. I …”

Her eyes wandered and she sighed, cutting me off: “Morocco, yes of course. You have such a life. So exotic. But what do I have? What could I have had …” She was married, had a child, a routine life — she said all this as though recounting penances imposed on her by a cruel and arbitrary judge. Finally, she clenched her napkin again.

“I waited so hard for your letters after you left the Soviet Union. I had this dream of marrying a foreigner and moving to a beautiful country. After you there was this rich Cuban who was studying here, and he was in love with me, but I was waiting for you, so I turned down his proposal. But then eventually I had to get married, didn’t I?”

“Did you?”

“What else was I to do? Now, look at how my life has turned out. I have no life, no life, no life at all. All I do is take care of Mama and Grandma and my daughter. Oy, I have no life!”

I sat back. Our eyes dropped to our empty plates. I tried to console her, but my words sounded hollow in view of her pain, and she was not looking at me anyway. I suddenly wondered what I was doing there with her. What I had taken for despair in her eyes 11 years before might have been cynicism, and who would have used whom? It was as if I had never known the person sitting in front of me.

There was no way to change anything now — or at least no way we were prepared to take. The waitress brought us our pasta. With the candlelight flickering over her red hair and fine couture, over her chapped hands, she asked me to help Grigori find a better job with a Western company in Moscow, and I agreed. Probably that was why she had called me. We finished our meal in silence.

She had felt the same passion on the ocean liner that I had, but passion for her was to lead to a concrete result: to marriage, to a secure and prosperous life in the West. I had been as reckless as I was naive then, but who could blame her for wanting these things? Who could fault her for a calculating approach to an emotional matter that would decide her entire life? I had regretted letting her go, but she would have used me for all the most pardonable reasons, and I would have resented it and ended up miserable.

After dinner we walked back to the square with little left to say. We hugged curtly, and she slipped through the door to the subway and was gone. I turned and started walking back home, and that was the last I saw of her.